About this blog

“There is more to life than medieval books, but it’s a good place to start.”

I am a book historian at Leiden University, The Netherlands, where I study medieval manuscripts – books from before the invention of print. My research and teaching is hands-on, with real objects on the table. A good day for me is having medieval dirt on my hands. I am also directing a project on twelfth-century manuscript culture: “Turning Over a New Leaf: Manuscript Innovation in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance”. If you want to know more about my work, check out my research profile or my project’s website. If you are interested in watching some lectures I gave, some of them are available here.

This blog was started 22 August, 2014 and I am aiming to publish two posts per month. They are around a thousand words long and deal with topics related to my research. Ultimately, this blog aims to show you what is so special and attractive about medieval books. The images I use are mostly taken from online databases. However, I have recently developed an interest in photography of old books, so also expect pictures made by myself as well (like the one showing a mouldy, purple page, above).

Social media are important to me: they are means to share the beauty and relevance of medieval books with a broad audience beyond just academics. You can read more about my views on social media in this Neatorama interview and this Buzzfeed article on historians ‘who are killing it online’. Apart from my two blogs I maintain a Twitter feed about medieval books. My best known tweet featured inky cat paws on a medieval page: the image was picked up by various news outlets, including The Daily Mail and National Geographic – as well as Grumpy Cat.

The images on my blog are taken from public websites (these photos are accompanied by a link to the source) or made with my own camera (these can be recognised by the label “Photo EK”). To re-use an image from a public database, follow the link and check out the publication policy before reposting (it may have changed since I downloaded the image). You are welcome to use the images that I made myself, but please be aware that these are published here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license, which means you need to give appropriate credit to both the photographer and the library who owns the manuscript.